“Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. I’m certainly no expert when it comes to boats.”
She sat very still, hardly breathing, looking into his eyes. “You think he was killed, don’t you,” she said.
“I don’t know. Someone might have hit him on the head and put him in the boat and taken the sail away so that if he woke up he wouldn’t be able to hoist it and get back to land.”
“Someone?”
He stubbed out his cigarette and rose and walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, looking out. “You remind me of Jack,” Bella said behind him, “standing there. Only you’re bigger.”
Quirke made no comment. “You’re sure he didn’t tell you, that night, what was on his mind?” he asked.
“I told you,” she said, “Jack and I weren’t like that, we weren’t-intimate.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “You weren’t?”
“I told you-not that way. And for God’s sake don’t keep standing there like that, will you?”
He came back to the sofa, but did not sit. “I think I should go,” he said. He found he was as much surprised by this as she was.
She looked up at him, tightening her lips and moving her teeth as if she were nibbling on a small hard seed. “Why did you come here?” she asked.
“Because you invited me.”
She was still watching him, her eyes narrowed. “You came to see what you could find out about Jack, didn’t you.”
“Yes.”
At the front door, as he was putting on his hat, she asked if he would come to see her again. He chose to misunderstand, and said that if there was anything she wanted to tell him, or to ask him, she could call him at the hospital. She smiled coldly. “That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
Before he reached the garden gate she had shut the door.
Inspector Hackett felt put out. He had caught Quirke pretending not to see him in the churchyard, before he went off with the woman in the beret. He tried not to mind, but he did. Of course, he knew about Quirke and women; but all the same.
Who was the blonde, anyway? he wondered. Somehow he did not think she was a relative of the dead man. He had spent his working life studying people, how they looked, the stances they took, the way they moved, and he had seen at once that this woman did not belong among the Clancys or the Delahayes. He guessed she must be one of Jack Clancy’s old flames-Jack was rumored to have had quite a few. And Quirke would have spotted her straightaway for who she was, being something of an expert himself in that particular field. The blonde, he thought, would be well able for Quirke. He chuckled. Poor old Quirke, always getting himself in the soup.
Once out of the church gate he walked down to the seafront and turned right along Queen’s Road. A pleasant way, with the trees in heavy leaf and the fine houses standing back in seclusion behind them. A feeble rain was falling; he disregarded it. He liked the smell of rain on grass and leaves; it reminded him of his boyhood and his grandfather’s farm. Happy times, long gone.
This was a peculiar business. First Delahaye had done away with himself and now Jack Clancy is drowned. What the connection was between the two deaths he did not know; not yet. But there had to be a connection. Quirke was convinced Clancy had been murdered, because of the knock to the head. This seemed fanciful to Hackett, but he trusted Quirke’s instincts in these matters. Quirke knew the dead the way he himself knew the living. He chuckled again.
It was only a bit after noon but he realized he was hungry. He retraced his steps, leaving the seafront behind and climbing the hill towards the town. Halfway up he stopped at a pub-Clancy’s; now there was a coincidence-and sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a ham sandwich and a glass of red lemonade. The barman, a pustular fellow with a missing front tooth, lent him a copy of the Press to read. “ MINISTER URGES HIGHER TURF PRODUCTION.” Emigration was up, burglaries were down-the one, no doubt, the consequence of the other. “ ANIMAL GANG MEMBER SENTENCED.” He sipped his lemonade, the syrupy sweet taste another echo of boyhood days. As his eye skimmed the columns of print his mind kept drifting back to the question of Jack Clancy’s death, touching it lightly here and there, as if it were the man’s corpse itself. Clancy’s son had been on the boat when Delahaye had shot himself-his presence there a thing for which no explanation had yet presented itself-and then Clancy himself goes down in a boat that either he or some other or others had scuttled. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? That had to be it. Vengeance. But who was the avenger, and what was the cause?
There was a flurry of movement and a young man with red hair perched himself on the stool next to his. Hackett sighed. The bloody pub was empty, yet this fellow had to choose to sit right here beside him. He concentrated on the paper, frowning irritably. Productivity, the Minister said, was the key to solving the country’s economic and social problems.
“Hello, Inspector,” the young man beside him said. He turned. Widow’s peak, narrow face, freckles. Who-? Reporter, yes. Jimmy somebody. The Mail? The young man seemed mildly offended not to have been recognized straightaway. “Minor,” he said. “Jimmy Minor.”
“Ah, yes,” Hackett put on a large, slow smile. “One of our representatives from the fourth estate, if I’m not greatly mistaken.”
Jimmy Minor took out a packet of Gold Flake, lit one, put the packet away. “Thanks, no, I won’t,” the Inspector said with soft sarcasm. Minor took no notice. Hackett took a bite of his sandwich.
“You were at the funeral,” Jimmy Minor said.
“Were you there?” the Inspector said, chewing. “I didn’t see you.”
“We blend into the crowd, us fourth estaters.”
Hackett was fascinated by the way the young man smoked, almost violently, twisting up his mouth and sucking at the cigarette as if he were performing an unpleasant task that had been imposed on him and that he was condemned to keep carrying out, over and over. He had ordered a glass of stout and a sandwich, and now the barman brought them.
“Were you there for the paper?” the Inspector asked.
“No.”
“Ah.” Minor had lifted a corner of the sandwich and was examining doubtfully the slice of bright orange cheese underneath and the thin smear of butter. “Just curiosity, then?” Hackett said. It came to him that Minor was a friend of Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe. A sort of friend, anyhow-friendship, he surmised, was not likely to be a thing that Minor would give much energy to. The barman, idling behind a skittle row of beer taps, was fingering an angry red crater on his chin. Hackett watched him, regretting the sandwich he had just eaten, which those fingers had probably assembled.
“Well,” Minor said, with the air of a man getting down to business, wiping a thin line of creamy beer froth from his upper lip, “what do you think?”
Hackett could not take his appalled eye off the barman and those probing fingernails. “What do I think of what?” he asked distractedly.
Minor snickered. “This business with Clancy and Delahaye, the two of them gone within less than a fortnight of each other.”
“A remarkable coincidence, all right,” the Inspector said mildly, and took a sip of his lemonade.
Minor turned to him with an exaggerated stare of incredulity. “A coincidence?” he said. “Do you think I came down in the last shower, or what?”
Hackett brought out a packet of Player’s and with pointed courtesy offered Minor a cigarette, which Minor was about to take when he realized he already had a Gold Flake going.
“So tell me,” the Inspector said, “what do you think these two misfortunate deaths were due to, if not coincidence?”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence.” Minor was waggling his empty glass, trying to catch the attention of the dreamy barman. “I think,” he said, “there’s something distinctly-another glass here! — something distinctly queer about the whole thing. I hear, for instance, that Clancy had half his head knocked off before the boat went down. He hardly did that to himself.”
Hackett sighed. This, he reflected, was how things got about, to muddy the water and darken the air. “Half his head, you say? I hadn’t heard that.”
